ABSTRACT

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries witnessed a great deal of speculation about the nature of personality. Traditional Christian notions of the soul as an eternal, immaterial spiritual substance were under attack. As the Enlightenment proceeded, the uniqueness and complexity of individual character came under unprecedented scrutiny, and the rights and values of the individual were accorded a new importance. The change is so pronounced that some historians believe this was the age in which ‘affective individualism’ came to birth, a process which eventually culminated in the ‘liberal humanism’ which characterizes Western society at the present day. This view has not carried universal conviction: some observers believe that the effects attributed to the Enlightenment really came much later, and that much enlightened thought was deeply conservative; others extend their critique to post-industrial Western society, arguing that ‘liberal humanism’ and its attendant doctrines are an attempt to create an acceptable face for capitalist oppression. Perhaps the Enlightenment was more a matter of changing rhetoric than of improved conditions for oppressed individuals; nevertheless, the rhetoric is there, and it repays examination.